[Rd] specials and ::

[Therneau, Terry M., Ph.D.]

Thanks to all for the responses. A couple notes It is nice to get the overall feedback 
that I'm not nuts to be terribly annoyed by this, and don't need to fix it tomorrow. 
Berwin 's note brings to mind the old adage that "The reason it is so hard to make things 
foolproof is that fools are so ingeneous." 1. Using survival::strata(inst) in the rhs of 
the survdiff call does not generate an error message. Because the stata function is not 
recognized as special one instead gets the wrong answer. (Or I should say, "the correct 
answer to a different question".) Ditto for most of the rest of the package functions. The 
very worst kind of bug. 2. Using specials =c("strata", "survival::strata") could work. I 
always process the result with a small "untangle.specials" function, a leftover from when 
R and Splus returned slightly different formula structures. I could put post-processing 
there. I'll think on this some more. But Ivan's follow-up was not encouraging. 3. Bill's 
suggestion to pre-fix the formula. Not a bad idea. If I followed the Call <- match.call() 
that lives at the top of my code by an immediate fix of the formula portion of the list, 
then all else would flow. And as perhaps a bit of a snark, the user would see the 
corrected form in their printout. The nuts who want to call a survival routine without 
attaching the name space will be out of luck though. Terry
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